SweepCap

한국어

A Windows capture utility where the capture is over the moment you finish a drag with the modifier held. There is no pressing a shortcut, waiting for a tool to appear, then selecting a region. The drag is the capture.

Download

Get the latest version from the releases page. It is a single file, SweepCap.exe.

• No installation. Put it anywhere and run it; it lives in the tray.
• No runtime to install.
• No administrator rights required.
• Runs on Windows 10 and later.

Usage

The default modifier is Ctrl+Win, changeable from the tray menu.

Gesture	Action
Ctrl+Win + drag	Capture a region
Ctrl+Win + click	Capture the window under the cursor
Ctrl+Win + click on the desktop	Capture that whole monitor
Shift during a drag	Snap the selection to a grid
Right click, ESC	Cancel
Ctrl+Win while resizing a window	Snap the window size to a grid on release

Every capture goes to the clipboard and to a PNG file at the same time. Files land under Pictures\SweepCap\<date>\ as AppName_date_time.png, and double-clicking the tray icon opens that folder. The name of the application you captured is in the file name, which is what makes a capture findable later.

The tray menu

Every setting lives in the tray icon's right-click menu.

• Open capture folder: opens the folder your captures are saved in.
• Change shortcut: picks the shortcut combination. Over RDP, pick a combination without the Win key.
• Capture grid: the grid pitch for grid-snapped captures.
• Window grid: the grid pitch for snapped window resizing.
• Dim outside: how dark the screen outside the selection gets.
• Save folder: changes where captures are saved. The option to keep everything in one folder without date subfolders is here too.
• Run at startup: starts with Windows.
• About: version and author information.
• Restart: restarts the application.
• Exit: quits the application.

Why it works this way

Conventional capture tools go through "press a key, a tool appears, select a region". A keyboard shortcut system cannot see the mouse, so the key press and the drag are forced apart, and that is where the mode comes from.

SweepCap takes mouse input directly and removes that separation. The moment the button goes down with the modifier held, the screen is frozen, and the crop is taken from that frozen frame. That is why it is fast, and why the selection UI can never appear in the result.

Features

• Region, window and whole-monitor capture are one gesture: a drag selects a region, a click takes a window.
• Window captures keep the Windows 11 rounded corners, with transparency.
• Grid snapping for both captures and window resizing, with the pitch chosen in pixels or as screen divisions.
• The clipboard carries both PNG and DIBV5, so alpha survives regardless of which application you paste into.
• Multiple monitors and per-monitor scaling (Per-Monitor V2 DPI) are supported.
• The UI ships in Korean and English and follows the Windows display language.
• Every setting lives in the tray menu: the modifier, the grids, the save folder, date subfolders, and run at startup.

Building

Visual Studio 2022 (Desktop development with C++) and the Windows 11 SDK. There are no external package dependencies; cloning the repository is enough.

build.bat release

The result is build\release\SweepCap.exe.

Requests and bug reports

Send them to pjh85336@gmail.com.

Other tools by the same maker

• TabStick, sticky index notes that attach to windows.
• Edgetree, a VS Code explorer-style file browser docked to the screen edge.
• DeskNoise, a tray sound generator that layers tones and noise into a background sound.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md. Includes Microsoft's WIL (MIT License).

About the development

This tool was designed and refined by its maker, with the implementation done in collaboration with Claude Code (Anthropic). Feature decisions, UX design and testing all come from daily real use.